Top Tech Execs: Scott Kriens

"We set out in 1996 with a mission built around connecting billions of users to one common network infrastructure," says the chief executive of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper
. "Four years later, the mission has not changed one bit."

Why should it? Kriens' philosophy has proven to be both prescient and durable, as evidenced by his company's fantastic growth. In two years since shipping its first product, Juniper has amassed nearly one-quarter of the market for high-end routers--hardware systems carrying an average price of $400,000 that speed information across the Internet.

In the process, Juniper has taken a bite out of
Cisco Systems
, which had a virtual lock on the router business until Juniper came along with systems that run up to four times faster and demand less power than the best routers from Cisco.

Besting Cisco has to be a kick for Kriens. Before joining Juniper in its infancy, he was co-founder and vice president of sales and operations for
Stratacom
, an early maker of equipment for speeding up networks. He was there for ten years until 1996, when Stratacom was sold for $4.5 billion to Cisco.

A San Francisco Bay area native, Kriens, 43, got his bachelor's degree in economics from California State University at Hayward in 1979. He served marketing stints with
Burroughs
--which merged with
Sperry
in 1986 to form
Unisys
--and
Tandem
, now part of
Compaq Computer
, before getting the entrepreneurial bug at Stratacom. After that company was sold, Kriens took time off to build a house and have a child. Then
Crosspoint Venture Partners
recruited Kriens to take the reins at Juniper.

"Scott has lived up to every expectation we had and more," says Crosspoint Managing Partner Rich Shapero. "He's shown an enormous amount of the right kind of leadership, both business and strategic."

The move proved to be a great one for its new CEO. Juniper's stock defied market bears earlier this year, rising from $57 at the start of 2000 to an all-time high of $243 in mid-October. And even though it has dropped recently with the rest of the market, it's still trading at $145. That makes Kriens' 4.5% stake in the company worth more than $2 billion.

Wall Street's infatuation with Juniper is a direct result of company's walloping financial growth. After starting from scratch in 1998, revenue reached $103 million last year, are expected to land between $625 million and $640 million this year, and could double next year.

Like a lot of successful Internet CEOs, Kriens puts a high priority on the ability to stay on track--a difficult thing to do when you're growing like a weed. "The most powerful weapon to come out of Juniper is the power to focus," he says. "The Internet is a place where it's easy to be distracted, and remaining focused in the frenzy is a very powerful advantage."

To some degree, Juniper, like other high-octane Internet startups, owes its success simply to luck, by being in the right place at the right time with the right product. "We certainly have benefited from a strong market," Kriens concedes.

"But it's more than luck," he insists. "We sat down with a purpose and a mission and we have stuck to that, and the market has widened in our path."